Category Archives: Crime

Delicious Mayhem in 3 Crime Thrillers

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reading, book

photo: Kamil Porembiński, creative commons license

Recent vacations gave me the chance to delve into my scary pile of “to-read” books, where I discovered these gems. I hope you’ll enjoy them too.

*****The Poison Artist

By Jonathan Moore – About this psychological thriller Stephen King said, “I haven’t read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon.” Based in San Francisco, it’s the story of a UCSF professor of toxicology asked to help look for the presence of poisons in a set of torture-murder victims. Something very grim haunts the scientist’s past, his wife has left him, and he becomes obsessed with a beautiful, absinthe-drinking woman named Emmeline, whom he meets in an exclusive late-night bar. As the number of victims increases and he comes to know Emmeline better, he suspects she may be linked to the murders, but could he give her up? Is he the next victim? Smartly written and thoroughly immersive.

****Forgiving Mariela Camacho

By A.J. Sidransky – NYPD detectives Pete Gonzalvez and Tolya Kurchenko discover the body of a young woman inside what’s meant to look like an elaborate suicide device, but they see what really happened: murder. And Gonzalvez knows the victim, a Dominican beauty named Mariela Camacho whom he once loved. Maybe still does. As this police procedural unwinds, you learn more about Gonzalvez’s early life in the Dominican Republic, and the code the people he grew up with lived by. Kurchenko also has reasons to look into his past and his family’s enemies in Russia. Past and present move toward a deadly collision in this fast-moving ride through the city streets. It’s also a powerful testament to friendship. The detectives’ banter—spiced with Dominican Spanish—is entertaining and genuine. The book won the 2016 David Award at the annual Deadly Ink conference.

****The Good Cop

By Brad Parks – Reporter Carter Ross is based in Newark, New Jersey, quietly rebelling against the commodification of the news for internet and social media tastes. This is the fourth book featuring Ross and his wicked sense of humor. He needs it, because his work takes him to some pretty dark places. Ross is looking into the suicide death of Newark policeman Darius Kipps and before long decides the death wasn’t a suicide at all. Clues are hard to come by, though, and he can recognize stonewalling when he encounters it. The paper accepts the official story, so he’s pretty much on his own, depending for help on a lively and engaging set of secondary characters. Absinthe is drunk (apparently I missed a trend here). You’re reminded of the importance of deep reporting and a commitment to uncovering the truth somehow lost in the era of “non-stop news” soundbites.

***Casting Bones

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mardi-gras mask, New Orleans

photo: Larry Johnson, creative commons license

By Don Bruns – This is the first of a new series of police procedurals set in what the publisher calls “one of the most fascinating cities in the world: New Orleans.” Bruns—with five books in his Caribbean series and seven in the popular “Stuff” series—delights in the Big Easy’s atmosphere and culture in creating his backdrops, colorful cast of characters, and the shenanigans that take place. It’s a story that could take place only there, which is a real plus—like a visit without all the calories.

Disgraced former Detroit police detective Quentin Archer has relocated to Nawlins to restart his career. His ability to stay in Detroit floundered when he fingered a fellow Motor City cop—and, by the way, his two policeman brothers—for drug dealing. Suffice it to say, he’s a man who has to watch his back.

His interpersonal relations aren’t that much better in his new job. He can’t trust his partner, who admits to selling information about cases to unknown parties, and the mercurial sergeant in charge overtly dislikes the Detroit man. In the way of supervisors everywhere, he can make Archer’s life miserable and does.

When the body of a New Orleans juvenile court judge is found floating in the Mississippi River, the principal question on Archer’s mind is, Why? Why shoot Judge David Lerner? Was it because of his notoriously harsh sentences? Or did it have to do with the mysterious printouts found in the back of his Jag? Before any of these questions can be answered, in a bit of piling on,  two more judges are dead—one in a strange, possibly staged, motor vehicle accident, and the other in a mugging-gone-wrong.

In true New Orleans style, at least as much is hidden as is revealed. It’s as if the murky waters of the muddy Mississippi obscure the vision of the entire town, and no one seems to want the truth. Meanwhile, his partner—with the connivance of the higher-ups concerned about tourism—is on the verge of railroading a young black kitchen worker for Lerner’s death. Archer has only days to come up with an alternative scenario that sticks.

He finds help from an unusual ally when he encounters Solange Cordray, the beautiful daughter of a voodoo priestess. Because this is a multiple point-of-view novel, you read Cordray’s interpretation of events as well as Archer’s, his partner’s, and others’. It’s clear that her special knowledge of events past and future is not a cynical fabrication, and that, although what she perceives as messages from the spirits is not always clear, she sincerely believes them.

Some loose ends, especially regarding Archer’s Detroit woes, are not totally tied up by this book’s end, suggesting sequels to come. The publisher under-invested in proofreading, but, bottom line, this is a fast-paced read with great atmosphere and interesting characters and situations.

The Girl on the Train

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girl-on-the-trainThis movie thriller (trailer) written by Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Tate Taylor is based on Paula Hawkins’s runaway best-selling novel. Cognoscenti in the crime fiction world consider the book distinctly overrated, so an investment of two hours in the movie theater may be preferable to a dozen hours of reading. Maybe this was a bad choice. As Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com says, “The Girl on the Train is good trash. At least as a novel, it is. As a film, however, it’s not even that.”

The story is initially engaging, thanks primarily to excellent acting by Emily Blount as Rachel, the alcoholic protagonist. She knows her husband Tom had an affair and left their childless marriage primarily because of her drinking but seems to be spinning ever-further out of control, a vodka-in-the-water-bottle kind of drinker.

I’m not persuaded by critics who say the film withholds pertinent information, because it is mostly told from Rachel’s point of view. We see the world as she does—none too clearly—with a few scenes from the also-limited perspectives of the other two principal women.

Rachel commutes into the city every day from Westchester (London in the novel), and her train passes behind their former house. She can see him (played by Justin Theroux), his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson), and their baby. She also sees the devoted neighbor couple (Luke Evans and Haley Bennett), whose love seems perfect in these tantalizing glimpses. If her city job were real, exposing herself to hurt with this voyeurism might be torture. Since her job is imaginary, it’s pathological.

You will have guessed that the neighbor couple’s relationship is more complicated than Rachel apprehends, and when the woman turns up missing, Rachel’s obsessions and her hazy perceptions create havoc. It’s always fun to see Allison Janney, here as a police detective investigating the disappearance and trying to make sense of Rachel’s “evidence.”

Ultimately, the motivations that drive what turns out to be a six-sided story of love and lust, deceit and dangerous truth-telling are deeply clichéd, and there are a few too many close-ups of a befuddled Rachel. The Girl on the Train is a ride to nowhere terribly interesting.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 44%; audiences 56%.

Hell or High Water

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Ben Foster & Chris Pine in Hell or High Water

Ben Foster & Chris Pine in Hell or High Water

This modern outlaw Western directed by David Mackenzie (trailer) is receiving high praise from critics. Like the faceless cattle barons and railroad tycoons memorialized in 1950s celluloid, today it’s the bankers who are handy villains bent on destroying the little guy. That’s true even if the modern cowboy rides a drilling rig.

Brothers Tanner and Toby Howard (Ben Foster and Chris Pine, respectively) team up to rob branches of the Texas Midland Bank, an institution that has drained the value from their late mother’s ranch and now (since corporations are officially people, I can anthropormorphize) sits rubbing its hands, waiting to foreclose. That would be a double catastrophe, because oil has been found on the land, and Toby is desperate to hang onto it so he can pass this valuable parcel to his kids. But he lacks the cash to save it. Thus, the robber scheme is hatched.

Jeff Bridges & Gil Birmingham, Hell or High Water

Jeff Bridges & Gil Birmingham, Hell or High Water

On the hunt for the robbers are two Texas Rangers—Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). Hamilton is just weeks from retirement, and figures out the broad outlines of the plot. He just can’t quite put the pieces together. He rides his American/Indian/Mexican partner mercilessly, and you understand Parker’s stoicism in the face of these insults is part of the joke. He gets his own barbs in too. Early on, he asks Hamilton: “Are you going to do anything about these robberies, or just sit there and let Alzheimer’s take its course?”

Watching Hamilton and Parker is fun; watching the brothers is fun. They are real characters and they have real relationships here. For me, a big part of the fun is not knowing exactly what to expect, because the movie falls both within and outside the usual formulas. As Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Stephen Rea says, it’s “at once a tale of desperation in hard times and a keenly observed character study—or studies.” I’d give it 7 stars out of 10.

I had a little flutter when the lawmen referred to Lubbock (home of my grandparents) and Young County (my great-grandparents). The filming, however, was in New Mexico. Not the same at all.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%, audiences 90%.

The Future of Facial Recognition: Man vs. Machine?

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cctv2

photo: Andy Roberts, creative commons license

DCI Mick Neville of London’s Metropolitan Police Service runs a unit of people with superior facial-recognition capacity. He believes that image recognition will turn out to be the third revolution in forensic science, after fingerprint and DNA analyses. (This is part 2 of a 2-part story. Read part 1 here.)

Currently, the Met solves about 2000 cases a year based on fingerprints, another 2000 using DNA analysis, and 2500 with imagery recognition, at a tenth the cost of the other two techniques, he says. Writers of crime fiction have a lot to work with here.

Can’t Computers Do It?

Can computers eventually take over this job? People in the super-recognizer community say no. Part of the reason is the sub-par environments in which many closed circuit television (CCTV) images are captured. Says Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, “After the 2011 London riots, the Met gathered two hundred thousand hours of CCTV footage. Computer facial-recognition systems identified one rioter.” Gary Collins, one of the Met’s super-recognizers, identified 190.

Of course, computers are becoming more skilled all the time. Facebook’s recognition program, is touted as one of the best. Unlike CCTV, it mostly has well-lit, good-quality images to work with. It has a further advantage because it can narrow the universe of possible matches to the friends, family, and friends-of-friends of specific users. Yet even FB’s algorithm consistently identifies the wife of a friend of mine as me. When I look at her picture, I don’t see it, but Facebook does.

Computers definitely have some role, though, and the Met combines machine and human expertise. It uses a specially created computer program to narrow the number of images by broad demographics and type of crime, for instance, then lets the human super-recognizers make the match.

And, if facial recognition software is prone to error, Keefe says, logo-recognition algorithms work well. “It turns out that many criminals not only commit the same crimes again and again; they do so wearing the same outfits,” he says. That shirt with the six-inch polo player stitched across the left chest? Dead giveaway.

Where Next?

As super-recognizer approaches migrate to the United States (as they have already to St. Petersburg, Florida), authorities will need safeguards against false identifications. In the U.K., a case is never made against someone based solely on facial recognition evidence.

No one wants a repeat of the situation that occurred after the Boston Marathon bombing when the F.B.I. crowd-sourced the identification process, and innocent people were fingered. In these hysterical times, that could be deadly for false suspects (another plot wrinkle for us crime-writers). In the recent New York City/New Jersey bombings, a fingerprint had given them a specific name.

Hiring people for sensitive security positions at airports and nuclear power plants perhaps shouldn’t rely on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same in facial recognition skill, just as we don’t assume everyone is just the same in other job-skill domains. We test for those.

Because millions of Americans have little or no ability to recognize faces (see earlier post), researcher Richard Russell believes “it is statistically inevitable that some passport officers at American airports are face blind—and that quite a number are significantly impaired.” Why not make sure people in such sensitive positions are especially suited for these sensitive jobs?

Further Reading

Have a scientific bent? Here’s the research paper that started it all: “Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability,” by Richard Russell, Brad Duchaine, and Ken Nakayama, published in 2009 in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

***The Art of Forgery

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paint-brushes

photo: Lynn Friedman, creative commons license

By Noah Charney – In this richly illustrated book, author Charney explores many of the most notorious cases of art forgery—a deception that dates to ancient Rome—and the often colorful characters bent on deception. Like all crimes, this one depends on opportunity and motive.

While Old Masters may be a forger’s more likely and lucrative target, what about modern abstract artists? Can you tell the fakes? Take this clever quiz!

Opportunity

Until very recently, the perceived value of artworks and religious objects was solely expert-driven, based on connoisseurship. If a recognized expert asserted that a painting was a heretofore undiscovered Rembrandt, for all intents and purposes (especially sales value), it was.

Today, science provides museums and private collectors with increasing protection. Chemical, radiographic, and other advanced techniques can analyze paper, canvas, pigments, wood, and other intrinsic attributes of a work. A common giveaway is the use of paints that weren’t available at the time the artwork was supposedly created. But science provides protection only if would-be buyers insist tests be performed before they write out their check.

Over the years, forgers have responded by becoming more skilled in reproducing the materials and techniques of the past, so that often their work can pass all but the most detailed examination. Detailed digital replicas pose a new hazard to unwary purchasers.

Those engaged in an art forgery racket also excel in producing false documentation and paper trails. These establish the spurious lineage and history of ownership (called provenance) of a work. Forgers rarely simply copy an existing work—it’s too easily identified as already hanging in a museum or private collection. Instead, they precisely mimic an artist’s style and favored subject matter. This new work is then passed off as a “lost” or previously unknown masterwork, with all the paperwork to prove it.

Motivation

Why do they do it, when the possibility of detection is ever-present? Charney says some simply like the challenge of pitting their skill against that of past masters. A German newspaper said forger Wolfgang Beltracchi “painted the best Campendonk that ever was.” Indeed, some forgers have been artistic geniuses, but underappreciated and undervalued in their own time. For that reason, revenge against an indifferent art establishment contributes to motive. Art forgery is not treated as a particularly serious crime and rarely results in lengthy jail terms (usually for fraud). Many former forgers have gained substantial fame after their misdeeds were exposed.

More rarely, copies of paintings are made and substituted for the real thing, delaying detection of the theft of the originals. At Prague’s Sternberk Palace, thieves skipped the hard part and substituted a poster for the original they stole; in Poland, more ambitious thieves replaced the painting they stole with a painted-over poster bought at the museum gift shop. It took days for anyone to notice.

Unscrupulous dealers—con artists, basically—persuade some artists to create works in a particular style. The excitement and pride collectors feel when they “discover” a lost artwork typically makes the seller’s job easier.

Charney describes numerous examples of fraudulent art from over the centuries, and his comparison photos add much to the book’s enjoyment. (Forgery of religious relics is a cottage industry in Israel and the Middle East, detailed in Nina Burleigh’s excellent Unholy Business, touched on briefly in Charney’s book.)

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur “The world wishes to be deceived,” the book’s cover says, “so let it be deceived.”

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – August 2016

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(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine continues its 75th year celebration with another collection of classic and new stories. Collectively, they demonstrate many of the forms this genre can take. Whether you prefer cozies or police procedurals or amateur detectives or hardboiled, you will find them in EQMM’s pages. From the August issue, which celebrates past EQMM editors, here are four of my favorites:

• In “The Ten-Cent Murder,” the first EQMM editor, Frederic Dannay, teams up with his real-life friend Dashiell Hammett to solve a crime in 1950s Manhattan. Joseph Goodrich, whose play Panic won the 2008 Best Play award from the Mystery Writers of America, adopted a period tone for this amateur sleuth outing.
• I always enjoy Dave Zeltserman’s stories and their sly humor. This month Zeltserman deviates from his Julius Katz private-eye series to present a classic noir tale. In “The Caretaker of Lorne Green,” a man on the run from the mob poses as a home health aide and plans to rob his elderly, wheelchair-bound client, but which of them is more ruthless?
• Jonathan Moore’s compelling police procedural, “A Swimmer from the Dolphin Club,” begins with the discovery of a woman’s backpack, shoes, and neatly folded clothes underneath San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. Suicide? Murder? Disappearance? Will the truth come too late? Moore’s most recent book is 2016’s The Poison Artist, which Stephen King called “an electrifying read . . . I haven’t read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon.” High praise from the master.
• In Ruth Graviros’s psychological tale “Ted Bundy’s Father,” you are gradually overtaken by the same horror that grips the late middle-aged protagonist, Warner Chadason. Chadason has “enjoyed an unthreatened life,” as the author puts it early on, a life about to explode disastrously. His name reveals all. Graviros was a pseudonym used by EQMM’s second editor, Eleanor Sullivan.

EQMM regularly includes reviews of new books, as well as a monthly rundown of mystery/crime blogs and websites worth following up on, as well as additional features, especially in this 75th year. You can subscribe on the website or through Amazon. Or obtain the August issue here:

Miranda and the Police Interview

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streaker

No Miranda for you!? photo: Jonas Bengtsson, creative commons license

When Ernesto Miranda was arrested by the Phoenix Police Department in 1963, accused of kidnapping and rape, it’s a cinch that of all the things he thought might happen to him, the likelihood his name would become a verb was probably nowhere on the list.

In crime fiction, cops “Mirandize” suspects all the time. Too often, perhaps. Leslie Budewitz, a lawyer and president of Sisters in Crime, says that giving every character a Miranda warning is “one of the 12 common mistake fiction writers make about the law.”

Writers of crime novels and screenplays often don’t get their Miranda facts straight. The Miranda warning is based on the Fifth Amendments self-incrimination clause and the Sixth Amendment’s right to an attorney, in words familiar to any consumer of U.S. popular culture:

  • You have the right to remain silent;
  • Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law;
  • You have the right to consult with a lawyer and have that lawyer present during the interrogation;
  • If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you

As John Schembra points out in the comments below, some states have slight variations on the core Miranda rights, cited above, particularly as they apply to juveniles. Some of those interstate differences are described in this Wikipedia article (and subject to change).

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (in Berghuis v. Thompkins) a controversial case involving the right to remain silent, which some scholars believe weakened Miranda protections.

At last month’s Writers’ Police Academy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, police training officer Mike Knetzger agrees that fiction provides Miranda warnings far more often than actually appropriate or used in practice. He outlined the three essential elements that must be present for a Miranda warning to be necessary.

Crime + Custody + Questioning

The occurrence of an actual crime seems an obvious prerequisite, but in many situations, police may simply want to talk to a person—for background or as a witness, not yet a suspect. Violations and infractions (civil offenses) are not “crimes.” Examples are traffic tickets and the one Knetzger gave—just possibly from on-the-job experience—running out of the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field stark naked.

Individuals must be “in custody.” Even if they are at the police station, if they are free to leave, they are not in custody and, therefore, receive no warning. However, if they make “spontaneous statements” there—“He trashed my cooking one time too many and I hit him over the head with the frying pan”—those statements can be used in court.

The questioning of the individual must be intended to elicit incriminating evidence, not just make general inquiries. After a crime is committed, the police may ask a great many people about the events and the people involved. None of these are necessarily suspects—yet.

Next time you see, read—or write—that a fictional character receives a Miranda warning, ask yourself whether all three of the above conditions are met.

***The Bends

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Woods Hole pier

photo: Andjam 79, creative commons license

By Leah Devlin – This current-day police procedural is the third mystery-thriller in a series that takes place in and around the picturesque village of Woods Hole, located on far southwest Cape Cod. Big water—Nantucket Sound, Cape Cod Bay, Buzzards Bay, the Atlantic—is never far.

The irony that young Detective Bill Bleach, pale as his name suggests, is prone to violent seasickness is not lost on him. Unfortunately, corpses have the same effect on his digestion, and he has to deal with them too.

Devlin effectively conjures up the Woods Hole environment and the preoccupations of several principal characters: Nobel laureates Lindsey Nolan and Sara Kauni, who are inventing a new dive helmet, and marine biologist Jessie McCabe (protagonist of Devlin’s previous book, Ægir’s Curse). Nolan’s adopted daughter, Maggie May, takes the lead in this story. She’s an accomplished diver and a talented student at the nearby Newbury College of Art, as well as a former drug user whom Nolan met in rehab.

When two murders at the College baffle the police, a small group of students is at the top of the list of suspects, Maggie May chief among them. Unfortunately for Detective Bleach, he’s seriously attracted to the chain-smoking, brittle young woman. His partner begins to doubt his objectivity, and Maggie May to doubt his intentions. He desperately wants to clear Maggie May, and protect her too, since it appears to him she may be the killer’s next victim.

Devlin’s characterization of the art college—the faculty politics, the student life, the manipulations and rivalries—struck me as quite believable. Less so was the architectural design of the place, built in the 1970s, with thick interior stone walls. In fact, these walls are so thick they allow a passage down the middle, and slits in the walls (apparently invisible to the users of the various studios and offices) allow every room to be spied upon.

No one knows about this building feature except the architect who designed it, Edward Gripp. As a wealthy benefactor of the college and donor of the campus buildings, Gripp keeps a small office there, which allows him secret access to his “Labyrinth.” He particularly enjoys spying on two married faculty members carrying on a torrid affair.

Devlin’s development of Maggie May as a young woman determined to stay sober, who faithfully attends her NA meetings, and in times of stress turns to the psychological supports they provide, makes her an interesting, unique character. Her roommate and occasional dive-partner Lily is the precious daughter of a fierce mother, determined that her daughter succeed in every endeavor—in other words, one of those delicious characters you love to hate.

While the book could have used a good copy-editing to resolve some grammar and usage problems, Devlin writes in a straightforward, unembellished style. You’ll find a little more plot (physical events) than story (emotional journey) in this novel, but it moves along briskly, with interesting characters, a well-created setting, and a satisfying surprise at the end.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

****The Kennedy Connection

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Kennedy half-dollar

photo: Eric Golub, creative commons license

By R.G. Belsky – Author Belsky was most recently managing editor of news for NBCNews.com and is a former managing editor for the New York Daily News, among other journalistic posts. He has ample experience to write authoritatively about his main character and first-person narrator, Gil Malloy, a down-on-his luck Daily News reporter, and about the book’s Manhattan setting. The Kennedy Connection is the first in the Gil Malloy series and takes place in 2013, as the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches.

When we meet Malloy, he’s been disgraced after a serious breach of journalistic ethics. Though he kept his job, he’s assigned to the newsroom dregs, while he watches another young reporter, Carrie Bratten, acquire the mantle of up-and-comer that he once wore. Frustrated with his second-class citizenship, he’s a little too quick to latch onto a story he thinks will redeem him.

Meanwhile, his former agent asks him to help her get publicity for a new book. The hook? The author claims to be Lee Harvey Oswald, Jr., illegitimate son of Kennedy’s assassin. Oswald, Jr.,  believes the book will clear his father’s name.

And a police buddy asks him to investigate the death of a young ex-gang member from the South Bronx, Victor Reyes. Reyes was shot 15 years earlier, left a paraplegic, and finally died when the bullet lodged in his spine worked loose and traveled to his heart. The unknown malefactor who shot him is now a murderer. Malloy’s friend is killed by a drunk driver before the reporter can do more than conduct a few initial interviews with family and cops on that case. Now one is a serious drunk and another’s a deputy police commissioner.

These distractions are soon cut short when a series of murders begins, each with a Kennedy half-dollar left at the scene. These deaths seem too much of a coincidence, taking into account the revelations of the new book by Oswald, Jr., especially when someone sends Malloy a letter promising more mayhem. In the envelope, a Kennedy half-dollar.

Malloy is teamed up with Bratten to cover this high-profile story and again riding high in his journalistic world. Author Belsky does a good job making Malloy a likeable character who could use a little more personal insight. The other newsroom characters are also well drawn, and there’s some engaging banter.

Just like Jake Epping in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, the character of Oswald, Jr., is trying to rewrite the history of JFK’s assassination and, like Jake, ends up having second thoughts about meddling with the past. Efforts to deconstruct what Malloy calls “the greatest murder mystery in history” have a substantial literary pedigree, from King’s work to Don DeLillo’s Libra, to James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, to Tim Baker’s Fever City. Belsky has made an engaging contribution to this lineage.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.